“No matter what comes,” he said in a stony voice, eyeing the dead wolves, “fight until there is no breath in your breast or blood in your veins. You are a child of the north, and that is our way.”
Leitos focused on drawing strength from his fear, the way Ba’Sel had said, but fear did not trouble him. One thought, however, did. All he had done to stay free had been for nothing. He would die this day. The dagger in his hand felt heavy and blunt, utterly useless, so he tucked it into his belt. If he fought, it would be with his bare hands.
“Do you understand?” Adham asked, a note of sorrow tingeing his voice. We are about to die, he might have said, but we will die proud.
Leitos nodded, wishing he had seen Zera once more.
Silence fell, broken only by the grotesque sounds of the shifting carcasses. One tumbled clear in a boneless heap. The creature’s broad skull, nearly severed from its neck, lolled. Where the corpse had been lodged, an irregular patch of darkness looked with festering malice upon the waiting warriors.
Instead of heaving the other wolf out with first, whatever sheltered within that darkness pulled it from sight by slow increments. Leitos waited, not daring to breathe.
The swath of darkness gradually redefined itself into an open doorway. Materializing from within, growing larger, twins points of emerald fire burned with hellish life. Leitos moaned low in his throat, knowing what he saw, but refusing to believe it.
Chapter 28
“No!” Leitos tried to scream, but the denial languished, never gathering the strength needed to escape his mind. Those green eyes drew nearer. Leitos fought for a deep breath, but shock and disbelief squeezed his chest tight.
“Make ready,” Adham said, taking three resolute strides forward to stand with the brothers. He nocked arrow to string and drew it back. The bow’s bone-and-wood limbs creaked as they reached full draw, and Leitos thought he could hear his grandfather’s pulse singing softly through the taut string.
Zera moved into the smoked light of the Sanctuary, dragging behind her a pair of dark, vaporous wings. Hers was a face of beautiful death in the eldritch light blazing from her gaze. As with the sooty gloom swirling in her wake, there was something ethereal about her, an aspect of transparency.
Leitos met her stare and something unspoken passed between them. A part of him wanted to run to her, wanted to feel her touch. That part tried to convince him that he was dreaming, that even now they were together, evading demonic wolves in some high mountain pass….
Another part cursed him for a fool for ever believing such lies. That part of him showed him how she had never needed rest or food, how she had fought with strength so far beyond that of mere humankind. Her eyes, burning with a wholly unnatural inner radiance, now spoke a truth he had continually failed to see. Even Lakaan had tried to warn him. “She is no more a warrior of the Crimson Shield than I am … Believe me, now more than ever, when I say she can look after herself. Believe as well that her doing so is a sight you do not want to behold.”
And how many times had he mentioned Zera to Ba’Sel, only to have him give some evasive or empty response? Why the warrior had avoided saying what he knew outright, Leitos did not know, unless he feared that Leitos was with her. And Ba’Sel had been right to be cautious, Leitos knew, even before Ulmek’s once mysterious words rose up with awful meaning. “I knew the day it was decided to help those wretches we would pay a price … you cannot admit that you erred … since those who betrayed us and were removed from our order are among the demons that attack us, those traps are all but useless.”
Zera shifted then, drawing his eye. From behind her wings emerged two more figures Leitos knew: Sandros and Pathil! Sandros glared about with one eye until he found Leitos. The darkness of that orb changed to muddy red. A deep and weeping cut had closed the other. He was on the bridge, the wolf that killed Lakaan, the wolf I attacked!
Stabbing pain lanced through his heart at the depth of Zera’s betrayal. Zera had not gone after the wolves, she had hidden herself away so that they could slaughter Lakaan … so that they could have the chance to kill him!
But no, had she wanted him dead, she would have done it herself. In a terrible flash, Leitos saw all that had happened since Sandros had dragged him from the river … their chance meeting with Zera and Pathil … the way she had so easily poisoned her fellows and escaped with Leitos … how no matter how far they had run, they had always been but one short step ahead of their pursuers....
Mind awhirl, Leitos struggled to piece the treachery together. At some point, Zera and the others must have come under suspicion, forcing them to flee before she could lead her true kindred to the Sanctuary. In her absence, the brothers had moved the Sanctuary…. They had not been running from the Hunters, she had let them drive Leitos along, a stupid bleating sheep that, at some point, the Brothers of the Crimson Shield would find and take into their Sanctuary in honor of some ancient agreement with an Izutarian king. In so doing, they would reveal their whereabouts.
Sandros laughed in derision when he noticed Leitos’s hurt expression. “I should have taught you a last lesson, boy: Never trust love.”
Pathil moved off to the other side, smiling at the brothers like an old friend, even as he tested the edge of his sword with a thumb. “Ba’Sel,” he called merrily, “have you managed to temper brother Ulmek’s rage?”
Ba’Sel ignored the taunt and studied Zera, his eyes shimmering with tears. “After all that I did to instill honor and goodness in your heart, after all the love your brothers gave, you return now as a traitor and an enemy? And you Pathil, foolish child that you always were, you benefited from the same devotion as Zera, and more. Yet you come into our Sanctuary and make mock of the man who saved your life on no less than three occasions? Is there no shame in either of you?”
Where Zera’s face showed a spark of disgrace, Pathil shrugged, smile widening. “Shame is for humankind.”
“And what are you, if not at least part human?”
“We are Na’mihn’teghul,” Sandros snarled proudly. “Ours are the faces that all Creation will one day wear. We are the perfection that the Three never dared dream. The Faceless One has foreseen our coming, and even now paves the way for our ascendency.”
“Na’mihn’teghul?” Ba’Sel said scornfully. “Is that what you call yourself, Sandros? Have you forgotten how we took you in after you fled your master, how we made you one of our own, gave you a life and purpose?”
“You always were a fool,” Sandros rasped. “Even now, your kind heart refuses to believe that it was I who came to you, a Hunter with the intention of destroying your pathetic band.”
“Na’mihn’teghul,” Ba’Sel said again, and spat. “I disbelieved such a low and despoiled affront to Creation could exist. It appears I was wrong.”
“You are wrong about many things,” Sandros said, his body swelling, changing between flesh and mist and back again. As he grew larger, his filthy robes shredded and fell away. A tawny, bristling growth of spines thrust from his darkening skin. His face rippled, elongated, becoming a brutish muzzle. His limbs bulged and bent, yet the all too human hands remained, talons ripping free of long fingers and toes. Pathil was changing as well, but not Zera.
Leitos could not take his eyes from her, still transfixed by the horror of revelation. She recoiled from his scrutiny until pressed against the doorway at her back. At her sides, Sandros and Pathil continued to transform.
Ba’Sel raised his voice. “You think to claim eminence with your false title—the Heirs of the Three—but you are the heirs of nothing. You are the consequence of a savage violation and defiled seed. Yours is a race of mongrels, born of human and beast.”
“Enough of this!” Zera cried, her voice as vast and powerful as the tides of all the seas of the world. “I have come for the last of the Valara line. I have come for Leitos … he is mine.”
“Come as you will, demon-born,” Adham snarled, “but you will take nothing.” With an insignificant twang, Adham
loosed his arrow.
The shaft hissed as it cleaved the air between itself and Zera’s heart, and the word Leitos had tried to shout before burst from his throat in a strangled cry. “NO!”
Zera smiled.
Chapter 29
Dark gossamer wings folded over Zera in a protective embrace. The arrow struck that gauzy substance and burst apart. Her indistinct shape billowed and swirled, rising like streamers of black smoke, until it brushed the ceiling’s arc. Then those wings unfolded, revealing a creature of tattered mists and sweeping shadow. Zera’s eyes blazed with a terrible conceit.
Leitos had glimpsed such a creature before when he returned to help her fight Alon’mahk’lar outside a nameless bone-town. “No,” he murmured. Desolation devoured the last of his strength and conviction.
“By the Silent God of All,” Ulmek breathed, “what is that?”
“It is our doom,” Ba’Sel whispered.
Zera advanced on eddies of black smoke, and her wings spread wider, beating slowly. An overpowering shock had spread throughout the brothers, freezing them in place.
Leitos did not move, his mind still trapped at the edge of that bone-town. No matter what Zera was now, she had once fought against her own kind to protect him.
“Zera?” he murmured, his legs taking him a step nearer. Green eyes found him, recognition burning in their depths … and something more, an emotion that simply had no right to shine in such a dreadful gaze. “Do not do this,” he pleaded.
Sandros attacked then, a man no longer. Snarling, the wolf leaped at Leitos, mouth agape, rows of deadly teeth glinting in the dim light of the Sanctuary. Before Leitos could move, a misty tendril streaked from Zera and enveloped the wolf. The wisp bulged as the creature trapped within thrashed and howled. The struggle continued long, horrifying moments, during which the howls became whimpers, then abated altogether. Zera released her victim. Dissolving bones and steaming fluid splashed over the ground.
“He is mine,” she said again, her voice a crooning purr.
“Protect the boy!” Ba’Sel roared.
Many hands drew Leitos away, but he barely noticed. His focus was on Zera.
With a shout, Ulmek and a few others set themselves against Pathil and Zera. Swords broke against her vaporous form, and her gaze never left Leitos. Growling, Pathil backed away from the warriors, but was quickly surrounded. With reckless abandon, Ulmek and his brothers continued their desperate assault.
Ba’Sel, Adham, and the others carried Leitos away. A dying howl and the screams of men filled the Sanctuary … then silence fell. Leitos managed to look over his shoulder, and saw that Pathil was finished, gored through and slashed in a dozen places. Around his corpse lay a few men, torn to rags.
Zera took up the chase. When she moved away from the doorway blocking the lower passages, a surge of Alon’mahk’lar burst forth. Leitos knew them well—the slavemasters. Horned and baying, they charged around her. Cudgels and crude swords smashed against Ulmek’s pitiful band, and hobnailed soles trampled the dead under.
Zera’s wings swept slowly behind her, whipping up dust from the floor to create a blinding cloud. The infernal glow of her eyes burned through the haze, never leaving Leitos.
Leitos collected himself enough to turn and run on his own, though hands still held him fast. Before the dust obscured their faces, Leitos saw the brothers who had been waiting at the far end of the Sanctuary, all staring with dazed expressions at the enemies bearing down on them.
“Go!” Ba’Sel cried.
The bulk of Ba’Sel’s men responded as he wished, but a score rushed to protect their leader. Taking advantage of the dust, they split into two equal bands and converged on Zera’s flanks. Screams immediately filled the chamber.
Ba’Sel spared a look back, cursed, then led the way into a passageway narrow enough to force the brothers to run single-file. An unexpected voice pressed against the running men. “They are coming!” Ulmek cried. “Run!”
The passage grew tighter, but the torch-lit air cleared and smelled fresher the farther they went. Behind them, the sounds of battle faded, replaced by harsh breathing and drumming feet.
All at once, Leitos and the others burst into the open. The brothers sprinted across a broad, stepped plain of sandstone. Behind them a rugged bulge of rock rose high above the narrow cleft that led into the Sanctuary. Overhead, twinkling stars and the waning moon cast down their weak light. A few miles to the south, waves pounded themselves to foam against a thousand rocky pillars marching out into the sea.
Not rocks, Leitos thought dazedly, a sunken city. Ancient towers leaned in all directions, and what he had first believed were rounded rocks proved to be domes.
His amazement faded, as the warriors set off at a dead sprint.
Two brothers kept hold of Leitos’s arms, helping him run. After a pair of hard, desperate miles with no apparent pursuit, Ba’Sel called a halt. The brothers instantly spread out and made ready to fight.
As Leitos struggled to breathe, he knew the blessed calm could not last. Zera was coming, and with her a host of Alon’mahk’lar. He glanced at Ba’Sel and found the same despair in the warrior’s eyes that filled his own heart. Zera, why? The answer left him sick in his soul: Zera was a creature conceived only to destroy humankind.
Adham took his shoulder in hand and turned him this way and that, making sure he was not hurt. He breathed hard too, but seemed better off than Leitos. “Can you go on?” he demanded, and Leitos nodded in answer.
“We must reach the sea,” Ba’Sel said then. “We will sail for the Singing Islands. For fear of drowning, the Alon’mahk’lar dare not follow.”
“What is the use?” Ulmek countered. “The islands will shelter us for a time, but there we will be trapped. We must stand and fight.”
“We are too few, brother,” Ba’Sel said gently. “Such has always been the reason we attack from the shadows of night, and spend our days hiding below ground. We are not now, nor have we ever been, strong enough to oppose the forces of the Faceless One in open battle.”
Ulmek shook his head. “I am done running and hiding. It is all we have ever known. I say we fight. If the brotherhood is shattered, so be it.”
“No!” Ba’Sel said. “We must survive. That is the only chance that the Faceless One will one day taste destruction. We have no choice but to run this night, and fight on a day of our choosing … the right day.”
Adham pointed out what the others had failed to mention. “If the winged creature can fly, the sea will not bar its way to us.”
“Perhaps not,” Ba’Sel said in a hushed voice, “but we stand a better chance against one, no matter how fearsome, than against an army of Alon’mahk’lar.”
Back the way they had come, a thundering shriek crushed the night’s calm. All eyes turned to find a living shadow blotting out the stars above the rugged hill guarding the Sanctuary. The creature winged higher, wheeling, searching.
Zera, Leitos thought. Even after seeing her change, he could scarcely believe she was not human. She would spy them soon, and moments after that she would be upon them, destroying the brothers with the same contemptuous hatred for humankind as that shared by all Alon’mahk’lar. Once finished with Ba’Sel and his men, she would take and use him for whatever purpose she intended.
Her cry came again, filling the night. In answer, Alon’mahk’lar horns trilled far off, from all quarters save the sea.
“Whether we flee or fight, it must be decided now,” Ulmek announced, his fierce stare proclaiming what he thought was the right course.
“Some must stay behind,” Ba’Sel said in a pained voice, “in order that the rest can reach the boats and sail for the Singing Islands.”
Before he finished, a score of men had broken ranks in the defensive line. They looked on their leader with unflinching eyes. As word quietly spread, others joined the first brothers to volunteer, until none stood apart.
“I could have wished all of you would have cast down his weapons and
fled,” Ba’Sel said. “That you have not leaves the choice to me.” He took a deep breath and called by name a dozen of the best archers, and did the same until an equal number of the finest swordsmen joined the first group.
“He is mine,” Leitos heard Zera say again. “Grow strong and cruel,” the voice of Adham whispered.
“I share your fear, but let none of us despair your sacrifice,” Ba’Sel was saying, voice wavering with emotion. “You will not be forgotten, my brothers.”
He might have said more, but Leitos did not hear. By then, he was running back the way they had come. Someone tried to grab him, but he dodged and kept on. Terror coursed through his veins, not courage. What drove him was guilt for allowing Zera to use him to find the Brothers of the Crimson Shield. He would not let them be annihilated for his mistake.
Chapter 30
Zera came, a winged nightmare falling from the sky, scattering those brothers who had given chase. Leitos steeled himself against whatever might befall him. Misty talons gently clasped his shoulders, and Zera carried him high, the wind of her wings buffeting him. As the world fell away from his dangling feet, his stomach knotted and rolled before relaxing. In that moment he knew a freedom he could never hope to describe.
Behind him, the brothers called out as they gave chase, their voices growing smaller and smaller, until they were no more. Leitos hung limp, eyes squinted against the wind, watching as the world spread wide beneath his feet. The shield of sandstone over which he and the brothers had run looked like stairs from on high. Farther north, a dozen separate bands of Alon’mahk’lar searched for their prey. To the east, the Mountains of Fire thrust upward, daggers of rock scrawled with veins of glowing crimson. In the west, the direction Zera took him, the scrubby desert ended at an irregular line of smooth dunes, frozen waves of white sand.
The sensation of flying and seeing the world in such an exciting way was nearly all-consuming, but one thought dominated: The Brothers of the Crimson Shield would escape, if they kept on toward the sea. The Alon’mahk’lar bands were disorganized and spread too thin to catch them.
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun Page 20
